By Marcena Hunter, Mukasiri Sibanda, Ken Opala, Julius Kaka and Lucy P. Modi

Today, the artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector is governed by increasingly comprehensive legal and regulatory frameworks, and is reliant on transnational supply chains that connect rural mining operations to international gold hubs. However, the increase in illicit activities in gold-rich markets has undermined the potential for this precious commodity to be a catalyst for development in these regional African markets. Effective responses to illicit activity in gold markets must seek to navigate the tension between combating criminality while maximizing the gold sector’s development potential. This requires a nuanced analysis of market dynamics, supply chains and networks. This study unpacks the factors that shape and drive the East and Southern African gold markets. Research covered multiple countries, providing insights into national and regional market dynamics and trade flows. The cross-border regional dynamics of illicit gold supply chains means examination of this issue requires applying a wide lens. South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe were selected for field research, with some limited research conducted in South Africa.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2021. 73p.

By Marcena Hunter

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in eastern and southern Africa provides economic opportunities to a wide range of actors that cuts across the formal, informal and illicit spheres. ASGM can involve everything from highly vulnerable individuals panning for gold on a subsistence basis to small-scale, semi-industrial operations illegally generating millions of dollars’ worth of gold. Regardless of the form, the vast majority of ASGM is linked to illicit gold markets exploited by criminal actors. The result is ‘a tightly interwoven web of livelihoods, social networks and competition for power and wealth’. This policy guidance, a follow-on from the 2021 report ‘Illicit gold markets in East and Southern Africa’, is intended to be a tool for those who wish to intervene or engage with the ASGM sector and illicit gold markets, including policymakers, government agents, development interventions, civil society, and businesses. Although this policy guidance is designed for eastern and southern Africa, it can be adapted for other regions.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2022. 54p.

By Lucia Bird and Lyes Tagziria

As the nature of armed conflict in West Africa is in flux – with the constellation of conflict actors multiplying, the intensity and geographic dispersion of violence growing, civilians increasingly targets of attacks, and conflicts more commonly spreading across borders – now is a key moment to consider the role played by illicit economies in creating the enabling environments for conflicts to develop, and in prolonging them.

Yet the intersection between illicit economies and instability is an often misunderstood and over-simplified subject of research and debate. The inherently clandestine nature of organized crime poses an obstacle to accurately understanding the dynamics of illicit economies and their relationship with conflict and instability. In West Africa, this is compounded by the paucity of comparable data in much of the region.

This report represents a step towards addressing this deficit. It presents the findings of a new initiative that maps the key geographic hubs of illicit economies across West Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo)

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2022. 88p.

By Jason Eligh

The flow of heroin from Asian production points to the coastal shores of eastern and southern Africa is not new. Whereas the first heroin transit routes in the region in the 1970s relied heavily on maritime transport to enter the continent, a number of transport modes and urban centres of the interior have increasingly become important features in the current movement of heroin in this region. Interior transit hubs and networks have developed around air transport nodes that use regular regional and international connections to ship heroin. As regional air routes proliferated and became more efficient, their utility and value for the heroin trade increased as well. Heroin is also consolidated and shipped over a frequently shifting network of overland routes, moving it deeper into the African interior in a south-westerly direction across the continent.

Consequently, a shallow flood of heroin has gradually seeped across the region, and this has had a significant impact on the many secondary towns found along the continent’s transcontinental road networks. These places, in turn, have spawned their own small local heroin markets, and become waypoints in rendering sustainable the now chronic, metered progression of heroin’s resolute geographic diffusion across the region.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2020. 100p.

By Simone Haysom

The heroin economy has shaped the growth of coastal villages, border towns and megacities across East and Southern Africa.

The trafficking of heroin is a crucial component of urban politics and development in East and Southern Africa. The heroin economy has shaped the growth of small coastal villages, border towns and megacities along the Southern Route – a network moving Afghan drugs south across the Indian Ocean and onward through Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique to South Africa. Rapid and dysfunctional urbanisation, the migration of low-skilled youth throughout the region, unemployment and the inability of local governments to cope with service delivery needs have contributed to the spread of the drug, building fortunes for a few ‘big fish’ and promoting corruption among police and politicians.

ENACT (Africa) 2020. 60p..

By Simone Haysom, Peter Gastrow and Mark Shaw

This report examines the characteristics of the heroin trade off the East African coast and highlights the criminal governance systems that facilitate drug trafficking along these routes.

In recent years, the volume of heroin shipped from Afghanistan along a network of maritime routes in East and southern Africa appears to have increased considerably. Most of this heroin is destined for Western markets, but there is a spin-off trade for local consumption. An integrated regional criminal market has developed, both shaping and shaped by political developments in the region. Africa is now experiencing the sharpest increase in heroin use worldwide and a spectrum of criminal networks and political elites in East and southern Africa are substantially enmeshed in the trade. This report focuses on the characteristics of the heroin trade in the region and how it has become embedded in the societies along this route. It also highlights the features of the criminal governance systems that facilitate drug trafficking along this coastal route.

ENACT (Africa), 2018. 54p.